Forum Discussion
Add Group Chat As A Channel
Hi all,
I am wondering if there is a way to make a channel in a team that behaves the same as a group chat.
I understand the advantages and disadvantages of conversations vs chats. Basically I like having conversation for work related things, the threads are good for organizations etc. At the same time I would prefer having a channel for general chit chat that behaves like a group chat (with the reply behavior of a chat and the general flow of a chat.)
Yes I could just make a group chat that has the same members as my team but it is less comfortable to continuously go between the Teams tab and the Chats tab, and also inviting members to both the Group and the Chat can be annoying when there are many of them.
Is there a way to do this that I missed?
43 Replies
I am just now realizing this is not an available function in Teams Channels, which begs the question "how is this not an available function in Teams Channels?" I have recently been told I need to migrate my team chat from a 3rd party app to Teams (bc that's our company standard). If you are working in an office setting using even a small monitor this may not seem like a big deal. If, however, you are managing a field-based operations where remote stand-alone members are trying to use Teams to stay abreast of fast paced operations and need a "stream of activity" chat-type functionality via phone then the "Posts" feature in a Channel just isn't going to cut it. This seems like a no-brainer winner of a solution, so what am I missing here?
- July 2023 - we're still searching the whole Internet for answers - HOW TO CREATE FREAKING GROUP CHAT WITHIN THE TEAMS CHANNEL. WE CAN'T AND WE'RE SAD. YES - SO SAD THAT WE NEED TO USE CAPS LOCK TO EXPRESS OUR SADNESS. MICROSOFT, WHY?
- this is such a good response I signed up to TechCommunity just to give it a thumbs up. This HAS to happen. Don't make us manage Team and chat membership separately, it goes without saying that one should be able to follow the other.
- same here, will get back in a year to see how many of us was igno.. eh "not enough inspirational" by MS 🙂
- Absolutely agree. This basically means we need to create and pin a Chat Group separately and rename it for the Team channel. Really weird and feels disconnected and hard to navigate.
ohanoch This is a must. I hope they work on this feature soon. I joined a project where they started using group chat as a method of communication and I am desperately looking for the day I get the feature to convert this to a teams channel.
This seems like such an obvious feature I hope it gets added at some point. No one in my org uses the discussions interface because it is clumsy and unfriendly. We presently use the chat of our recurring standup meeting for our social "water cooler" interactions, but it's not ideal and would be nice if Teams supported this natively in channels.
It also occurs to me that much of the clumsiness could be avoided if they just got rid of the "New Discussion" button and defaulted to showing a text field with a post button. Then it would actually behave very similar to group chat and people wouldn't be afraid to start new topics. Unfortunately that still doesn't fix the fact that replies would be chronologically out of order.- Hi there,
I've just posted a topic like this. I guess it will become a feature request ;).
There is my question and no, no add-in can do this unfortunately
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/conversations-chats-under-team-channels/m-p/3398659 - Nothing built-in for this scenario afaik, perhaps look into Teams add-ins?
VasilMichev Thanks for your reply! Unfortunately I didn't find anything in the add-ins...
